Tuesday - Election Day: the lies, threats and incitements of Donald Trump and co. must be resisted

 I was up early, as I usually am on weekday mornings, and by 6AM I was on my way to vote. My polling place is in the gym at Pleasantville High School. When I got there about 6:20, there was a short line, nothing like the lines for early voting at the Mount Pleasant Recreation Center since it opened for early voting on October 24th and the line moved quickly.

There are at least six and perhaps more Election Districts assigned to this location for voting. The lines for some were longer than for others but everything was orderly and moved along smoothly. I was on my way home, ballot cast, by 6:40AM.

It was a lovely morning, seasonably chilly at that hour, before the sun rose, and the people outside and inside the school building seemed energized, the younger voters really quite excited to be there, doing what they need to do.

My hopes for an orderly transition are fraught, but I hope the majority of people, the sane folk, keep things calm and the crazy folk, on either side, accept the results as we did four years ago. 

There is no denying the the incumbent is trying to incite sedition, and for that he should be tried and prosecuted once he is out of office. As he led chants four years ago, let's change the gender and LOCK HIM UP.

I also hope the Trump sock puppet, Rob Asterino suffers a serious loss in his run for State Senate. He is also corrupt, which just goes to show you that even people who seem nice can be rotten inside.

Pete Harkham has done a good job for us, and during the pandemic, he's been out there helping those who have the least.

Here's a few photos from my visit to the polling station.

Permalink https://kayester.blogspot.com/2020/11/tuesday-election-day-lies-threats-and.html

Wednesday - Foggy morning and then a beautiful day in October. Trump's lies multiply - do his followers believe him?

Something about the fall, waking up to a thick fog that slowly clears and becomes a day as lovely as today, with the trees showing their burst of color before shedding all their leaves and hunkering down for the winter, that makes me think about cosmology, quantum mechanics, Einstein's Theory of General Relativity and the implications of these amazing insights into how the universe is. I can ponder both the massless graviton and the incredibly massive black holes at the center of galaxies. I wonder about the spatial dimensions I cannot perceive because I evolved with sensory apparatus only capable of seeing three spatial dimensions. So much I don't understand, so little that I know.

I do know that the lies keep coming, and multiplying. My normal attitude toward politicians expects them to lie, but what's come out of the White House under Doofus Donald is of a different magnitude.

Early voting opens this weekend in NY State and I am going to vote. I won't say which candidate will get my vote but you can be sure it won't be Trump for President, Schulman for Representative or Astorino the sock puppet for State Senate.

Biden/Harris 2020.

These photos are 11 years old. I shot them in Bryant Park.

Permalink  https://kayester.blogspot.com/2020/10/wednesday-foggy-morning-and-then.html

Tuesday - I've fallen behind. A brief comment on cosmology and quantum mechanics.

I’m thinking too hard about cosmology. There is no reason for me to be interested in this subject. I am not a physicist, I am not a mathematician, I am not a philosopher. Those are professions whose practitioners have an excuse to study the subject. But I don’t want to stop thinking about this. Perhaps its to keep my mind off the bullshit politics that surround us.

The problem of the very large and the very small, and creating a theory that works for both, is very interesting to me. At the scale of the large classical physics works, Einstein’s theory of General Relativity and his field equations have been tested again and again, and they make predictions that experiments and experience confirm. Even the wildly exotic, black holes for instance, are first predicted and then discovered. It’s astounding.

At the scale of the very small, the things that make up the atom, and the things that make up the pieces of the atom, the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Field Theory and Quantum Mechanics also work, even if their implications seem completely counter-intuitive to our senses. And they are, but being counter-intuitive doesn’t mean wrong. And if the Copenhagen Interpretation fails to explain why Quantum Mechanics works, allowing predictions to be made that tests consistently show work, that’s a gap, not a fatal flaw. There are very smart people working on closing this gap, and though some of their conjectures are quite outlandish, proving any of them will be difficult.
One thought I had that I didn’t follow far, but nags at the edge of my thinking, is how well the math works. There are theorists who are exploring why the physics and the math work so well together.

The photos were taken at the cemetery where many of my family members are buried. The morning I was there, a person I am friendly with was doing an unveiling for the monument over his son's grave.

 If you were to search back to the photos I took at Sharon Gardens in the spring, you will see these cemeteries look very different.

 

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Thursday - prepping for a Fusion Arts event tomorrow

 Thursday again. Tomorrow I’m to emcee an event at the Van Der Plas Gallery on Orchard Street. The contemporary artist Shalom Neuman is producing. It will be multi-media and both live streamed globally and later broadcast on Czech TV. When I get the details for the live stream, I will post them. 

I only found out I’m the emcee two days ago and while I’m a bit nervous, I know I’ll do fine. Shalom wants me to wear something outrageous but I don’t think I will. It’s enough that I’ll be dealing with art projected onto my face and torso, and juggling a dozen poets and story tellers with fragile egos. I’m suppose to introduce them, making up whatever I want to say. The event is supposed to be political, so I’ve got a nugget of an idea that I can use to springboard into my ad libbed commentary. I will have fun.
 

Ron Kolm is coordinating and Keith Patchel is the sound arts man. Today we ran into a minor hitch. The America talking heads need batteries and Shalom bought rechargeables but there aren’t enough chargers or time. I looked at the battery case for one of the heads and noted to Keith that they looked like AAA but Keith said no, it’s AA. I commented that the older I get the smaller things look.
So we trekked over to a discount store on Ludlow St. near Delancy and bought 150 AA batteries. Of course it turned out that what was needed are AAA. I gotta laugh. At least the problem happened today and not tomorrow.

The photos are of Ron, Shalom, Keith, Adriaan van der Plas’ three assistants and a person who came in to look at the art on the walls of the gallery.

Permalink
 

Wednesday - Counting down the days to Nov. 3 - Amy Coney Barrett is not an honorable person

 I am counting down the days to the night of November 3 when the polls have closed. I am keeping my hopes in check. Optimism is good, but working at it makes it better. The battle now is to get out the vote. The Repulsive Republicans are doing what they can to undermine the election, suppressing voting among potential opponents where they can and propagandizing against the vote where they can't. They hypocritically promote themselves, as pro-democracy - and they are fine with democracy when things are going their way, but when it's not, they will do everything in their power to sabotage the system. There are things that state governments could do but those who control them do what they can to insure they remain in control - gerrymandering being a principal tool, controlling the voting process in a way to make opposition voting more difficult, putting up barriers to voting or taking them down, depending on which serves the ruling party best. It's a corrupt system and undermines respect for government. There are times when I find my attitude toward our so-called representational system eroding. But then I look around and find myself forced to acknowledge that it's the one I'm stuck with, so let me do what I can to make it better.

The President, Doofus Donald Trump, is flailing in every direction, full of sound and fury but not making much sense. He acts recklessly at his rallies, endangering the health of his supporters. He announces a policy one day and then a day later reverses course. He screams that the swamp is trying to erase his presidency yet anyone who looks at all clearly at his government sees a corrupt morass as bad as anything, if not worse, that's come before. 

I mentioned in a couple of earlier posts that if Amy Coney Barrett was an honorable person, and an honorable conservative, she would refuse the nomination, or delay accepting until after the election, and then only accepting if the dishonorable President somehow manages to get himself re-elected, which we are working to prevent. Today, a substantial number of Notre Dame University faculty sent her an open letter asking her to do the right thing for the USA. Great minds think alike.

 Today's photos take me back to a time before the Pandemic. These were shot a few years ago in Grand Central Terminal, on different days and times. Even at night, the terminal was busy.

 

Permalink  https://kayester.blogspot.com/2020/10/wednesday-counting-down-days-to-nov-3.html

Tuesday - I woke from a dream of the very small, and it wasn't about Trump's morals or ethics because they are non-existent.

When I begin by typing the day of the week on the title line,  I find myself tempted to plug in something such as, "Tuesday the quantum mechanic came by to tune the furnace. When he left, the leaves fell up," or something equally stupid, but I forebear. After all, the quantum mechanic hasn't figured out which wrench to use and I can't seem to fathom the possibilities.

Okay, so I admit it, I've been thinking about string theory, gravitons, dimensions of space we cannot see, multiple universes, the collapse of the wave function, and so many things for which I can do the math but only in my dreams.

Sitting at the dinner table last night, talking about Dante, I said. "he was 'dreaming dreams no mortal dared dream before." without remembering what 19th Century poet wrote that line. So I looked it up, and of course it was Poe. Then I was asked if I ever studied the equations. In truth, I replied, I did look at them but that didn't mean I understood them. And back into that same poem, but paraphrasing, I pondered, weak and weary. / Over many a quaint and curious volume of to my eyes impenetrable lore.

I won't worry that experimental physics is battling with theoretical physics because nobody's figured out a way to test string theory, yet. When you consider that the math is beautiful, elegant and consistent, even if there are no strings it's great to think about them. Consider as well the size of these things. I mean, they are small: very, very, very, very ... very very very small, not much bigger than a Planck length, and that is about as short a distance as can be, don't expect to wake up one morning and find a heap of these little energy entities spraying out of the shower head when you turn on the tap. Well I mean don't expect to see them. 

I very much appreciate that minds wired and trained differently from mine can do the math. 

The election is three weeks from today. People are already voting. Here in NY State, everyone can vote by mail, or beginning on 10/24 participate by early voting, or go to the polls on election day and cast a ballot. I hope the turnout is strong, which might be the only good thing to come out of this very bizarre campaign. 

I had an insight this morning into why Doofus Donald's striving so mightily to undermine his follower's belief in the vote: he hasn't figured out a way to do what Alexander Lukashenko did in Belarus, and doctor the vote to give himself an overwhelming victory. And even if he could figure it out, he knows that only his most devoted, unthinking followers would give it any credence at all.

So please, vote by mail or vote early or go vote on election day, whichever you prefer, and if you care about the future of the country, vote Biden/Harris, unelect Trump. If you live where you can unelect a Republican senator, that will help, too.

I think these photos are appropriate to the theme. All were taken in or near Grand Central Terminal.

Permalink https://kayester.blogspot.com/2020/10/tuesday-i-woke-from-dream-of-very-small.html

Monday - the tail end of Delta. The Repulsive wing of the Republican Party acts repulsively.

Today it’s been raining most of the day. The weather report predicted we’d get hit in this area with the tail end of what was Hurricane Delta. I don’t remember a year when we ran out of names and reverted to the Greek alphabet for naming storms, though the conductor on the train I’m on said he heard that it happened in 2007. Me not remembering that can be a consequence of working full time in and not paying as much attention. The pandemic and the election  make me much more aware of the news, and of anomalies. The storms have been tracking into the Gulf of Mexico and slamming the coast Louisiana, eastern Texas and Mississippi. I think this year they’ve been hit by four storms. As the conductor of the train said, “what are the odds?” Seems to me the odds are getting worse, and that every year at least one major storm slams into that region. Scary stuff indeed.

In Washington, the Senate confirmation hearings for a Supreme Court Justice to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg has begun. The same Repulsive people who swore that there should be no confirmation hearings in the time leading up to a Presidential election four years ago, are now rushing with desperation to confirm a pick they like before they get booted out. Hypocrisy in action in DC. No surprises there. There's a saying about power corrupting - and right now they've got power and they are corrupt.

While the deconstruction of the Chase building on the Park Ave. side of the block continues, they Madison Ave. building is down and they are getting ready to excavate. Not even rain stops this project.

Permalink https://kayester.blogspot.com/2020/10/monday-tail-end-of-delta-repulsive-wing.html